Religious, Spiritual and Cultural Education

Fittleworth is a Church of England school and we strongly value our Christian ethos. The school works hard to develop and promote links with St. Mary’s Church while opening eyes and understanding to other churches, religions and cultures around the world.

Religious Education forms an important part of our curriculum and covers all major religions, with a focus on highlighting the many similarities that exist, rather than the differences. We know that it is important to help children to begin the process of developing spiritual understanding in order that they can start to make sense of the very complicated vagaries of humankind.

We are also delighted that David Howling, minister of Pulborough Baptist Church, has weekly visits to the school, taking assemblies and helping in the classrooms. We value our special assemblies with ‘Splash’ and our sessions in KS2 with Bible Explorers. In addition we have the Rev Jim Winters from the Evangelical Church who takes a weekly assembly.

Children visit St. Mary’s as part of their curriculum. In KS1 children become involved in planning Baptisms and Marriage celebrations and this culminates in a church service with all the children taking part. In KS2 children will typically explore the architecture and layout of the church and churchyard as they begin to understand the customs and traditions of the Church of England. We have Church services at St. Mary’s to celebrate Harvest, Christmas and Easter and also try to host morning family services during the year.

Rather more difficult in this quiet backwater of West Sussex is the task of developing cultural empathy and understanding but we succeed in this through our Modern Foreign Languages program.

French is the language we have chosen to teach in school but we seize any other opportunities that may present themselves to promote our understanding of other countries, cultures and languages through special curriculum days. These are always much enjoyed and highly successful events.